Contemporary Usage
A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses (transmitted by SMTP), as in jdoe@example.com (the user jdoe located at site the example.com domain). BBN Technologies' Ray Tomlinson is credited with introducing this usage in 1971. This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form user@host is also seen in other tools and protocols; for example, the Unix shell command ssh jdoe@example.net tries to establish an ssh connection to the computer with the hostname example.net using the username jdoe.
On web pages, organizations often obscure email addresses of their members or employees by omitting the @. This practice, known as address munging, makes the email addresses less vulnerable to spam programs that scan the internet for them.
Another contemporary use of the @ symbol in American English is adding information about a sporting event. Opposing sports teams sometimes have their names separated by a v. (for versus). However, the "v." may be replaced with "@" when also conveying at which team's home field the game will be played. In this case, the away team is written first.
On some online forums without threaded discussions, @ is used to denote a reply; for instance: "@Jane" to respond to a comment Jane made earlier. Similarly, in some cases, @ is used for "attention" in email messages originally sent to someone else. For example, if an email was sent from Catherine to Steve, but in the body of the email, Catherine wants to make Keirsten aware of something, Catherine will start the line "@Keirsten" to indicate to Keirsten that the following sentence concerns her. This also helps with mobile email users who cannot see bold or color in email.
In microblogging (such as Twitter and StatusNet-based microblogs), @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. "@otheruser: Message text here"). The blog and client software can automatically interpret these as links to the user in question. This use of the @ symbol was also made available to Facebook users on September 15, 2009. In Internet Relay Chat (IRC), it is often shown before a user's nick to mark the operator of a channel.
@ is also used on many wireless routers/modems, where a solid green @ symbol indicates the router is connected and a solid amber @ indicates there is a problem.
Read more about this topic: At Sign, Modern Uses
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary and/or usage:
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